SciFridays: “Creature”

“Creature” is a 2011 film that is loosely based around the Native American ‘Wendigo’ myth (man becomes cannibalistic, becomes monster) but set in the Bayou with rednecks, which is marginally less offensive then it could have been.

Before I get much farther, I should warn my dear readers that this film is on the more adult side. It contains full nudity within the 1st minute, for instance. There is adorable swearing “Sweet baby kittens!” and real swearing. And, if we’re being honest, the crux of this film is kinda messed up.

ARC EntertainmentIt gets weird, people.

I don’t really discuss my process here – but it loosely involves playing “Pin the Tail on the B-Horror Film’ in Netflix. I pick my films based on how bad they look solely by the poster and description. I thought “Creature” was for sure a winner. It…it was a strange movie.

I suppose I’ll talk about the good parts first. One is the foley artists – the swamp sounds very ambient and real. The man-gator (oh, did I mention the man-gator?) rips and snarls and growls his way through. Not knowing what a man-gator should sound like, I am fine with this. The dialogue is decent, considering, although some of the lines are rather static and contain very little emotion. The prosthetics work is decent, although it seems like the makeup department has never cast full hands or feet before, and the appearance can be rather jarring. The actor in the suit moves rather strangely as well. Now, I love a good full-suit. Trumps CGI almost always. I saw the most recent “Predators” because it had full body suits. Lockjaw (man-gator) was not a good body suit.

Really my issue with this movie was the directorial decisions. While I’m not positive that this had any potential as a ‘good’ movie, it certainly lacked some technical prowess. A quick jaunt to IMDB reveals this is Mr. Fred Andrews’ directorial debut. It suffered from inconsistencies during filming, and a disturbing presence of ‘the long shot’. Now, in a horror film, the ‘long shot’ can be used to introduce tension that might not be there. This never happened. It was always a minute or two of like, forest. Some girl in the water. Not interesting shots, not even climatic shots. There was also a distinct lack of actual horror logic. The man-gator tears through bone like it’s butter, and often, but his cave is full of skeletons that have gaunt skin like mummies. Someone gets shot in the leg, and literally runs around on it afterwards. Girls pass out for no good reason. That same guy gets the snot beaten out of him, and promptly pushes through like a champ.

As I’ve said before, there is a lot of hillbilly nonsense in this film. Also incest. Lots of incest. The end of the film is scrambled together like they were seriously running out of time but didn’t know how to resolve it.

I’ll admit I had to go to Google for this one – but there are tarantulas in Louisiana everybody. Tarantulas. They will not, however, bite the hell out of you in an irrelevant effort to drive the plot.